The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (7 page)

I want to say that

forgiveness keeps on

dividing, that hope

gives issue to hope,

and more, but of course I

am saying what is

said when in this dark

hallway one encounters

you, and paws and

assaults you—love

affairs, fast lies—and you

say it back and we

blunder deeper, as would

any pair of loosed

marionettes, any couple

of cadavers cut lately

from the scaffold,

in the secluded hallways

of whatever is

holding us up now.

One changes so much

from moment to moment

that when one hugs

oneself against the chill

air at the inception

of spring, at night,

knees drawn to chin,

he finds himself in the arms

of a total stranger,

the arms of one he might move

away from on the dark playground.

Also, it breaks the heart

that the sign revolving like

a flame above the gas

station remembers the price

of gas, but forgets entirely

this face it has been

looking at all day.

And so the heart is exhausted

that even in the face

of the dismal facts we wait

for the loves of the past

to come walking from the fire,

the tree, the stone, tangible

and unchanged and repentant

but what can you do.

Half the time I think

about my wife and child,

the other half I think how

to become a citizen

with an apartment, and sex

too is quite on my mind,

though it seems the women

have no time for you here,

for which in my larger, more

mature moments I can't blame them.

These are the absolute

pastures I am led to:

I am in Berkeley, California,

trapped inside my body,

I am the secret my body

is going to keep forever,

as if its secret were

merely silence. It lies

between two mistakes

of the earth,

the San Andreas

and Hayward faults,

and at night from

the hill above the stadium

where I sleep,

I can see the yellow

aurora of Telegraph

Avenue uplifted

by the holocaust.

My sleeping

bag has little

cowboys lassoing bulls

embroidered all over

its pastel inner

lining, the pines are tall

and straight, converging

in a sort of roof

above me, it's nice,

oh loves, oh loves, why

aren't you here? Morgan,

the pyjamas are so

lonesome without

the orangutans—I write

and write, and transcend

nothing, escape

nothing, nothing

is truly born from me,

yet magically it's better

than nothing—I know

you must be quite

changed by now, but you

are just the same, too,

like those stars that keep

shining for a long time after

they go out—but it's just a light

they touch us with this

evening amid the fine

rain like mist, among the pines.

Stranger, to one like you,

here only the old

people feel like talking—

but abruptly, as if already in the midst

of talk, as if they sensed

with you a kinship in closeness

to endings—and you aren't kind

with them. Stranger,

here the sea doesn't obliterate,

but just lies there carved up

into bays and inlets, indolent

or waiting. In the town's one

hip bar the lesbians lean

into sinister embraces, dancing

together and speaking just softly

enough that you can't hear. Your girl

is gone and you are here

because you think maybe they

have taken her from you

into this establishment where the men

stink like murdered sea animals;

they have flying beards, black

mouths they spill the beer

into over their laughter

so that you think of someone urinating on coals.

Sometimes you unexpectedly taste

the inside of your own mouth, choking

as you kiss this bitter foreigner,

and you feel yourself forgetting, even as you remember,

that you've gone strange and everybody

else is happy and just having

good clean fun in a place where the ocean

is large and cares nothing for men,

that you are an image of blood

graven amid peace and wine,

a strange one,

claustrophobic and heart-stopped among

garden parks through which boys

jog perspiring in their red basketball

shorts and in which toddlers

in blue parkas on toy horses rock themselves,

already stupefied, toward oblivion.

There's nobody here

but you, sitting under

the window at the corner

table as if waiting

for somebody to speak,

over your left shoulder the moon,

behind your head a vagina,

in pencil, emblazoned

above a telephone number.

For two hours you've been

looking across the street,

quite hard, at the grand store,

the Shopper's Holiday felled

across the sunset.

It grows dark in this climate

swiftly: the night

is as sudden and vacuous

as the paper sack the attendant

balloons open with a shake

of his scarred wrist,

and in the orange parking

lot's blaze of sulphur

arc lamps, each fist

of tissue paper is distinct,

all cellophane edged

with a fiery light that seems

the white heat of permanence

and worth; of reality;

at this hour, and in this

climate where how swiftly

the dark grows, and the time comes.

Whatever the foghorns are

the voices of feels terrible

tonight, just terrible, and here

by the window that looks out

on the waters but is blind, I

have been sleeping,

but I am awake now.

In the night I watch

how the little lights

of boats come out

to us and are lost again

in the fog wallowing on the sea:

it is as if in that absence not many

but a single light gestures

and diminishes like meaning

through speech, negligently

adance to the calling

of the foghorns like the one

note they lend from voice

to voice. And so does my life tremble,

and when I turn from the window

and from the sea's grief, the room

fills with a dark

lushness and foliage nobody

will ever be plucked from,

and the feelings I have

must never be given speech.

Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,

and I am almost ready to

confess it is not some awful

misunderstanding that has carried

me here, my arms full of the ghosts

of flowers, to kneel at your feet;

almost ready to see

how at each turning I chose

this way, this place and this verging

of ocean on earth with the horns claiming

I can keep on if only I step

where I cannot breathe. My coat

is leprosy and my dagger

is a lie; must I

shed them? Do I have

to end my life in order

to begin? Music, you are light.

Agony, you are only what tips

me from moment to moment, light

to light and word to word,

and I am here at the waters

because in this space between spaces

where nothing speaks,

I am what it says.

We've been to see a movie, a rotten one

that cost four dollars, and now we slip

in a cheap car along expensive streets

through a night broken open like a stalk

and offering up a sticky, essential darkness,

just as the terrible thing inside of me,

the thick green vein of desire or whatever it was,

is broken and I can rest.

Maybe in another place and time, people

drive slowly past the taverns

with black revolvers reaching from their windows,

but here in the part of night where every

breath is a gift tremendous as the sea,

thousands of oleanders wave

blossoms like virgins after a war.

I can hear my own scared laughter coming back

from desolate rooms where the light-bulbs

lunge above the radios all night,

and I apologize now to those

rooms for having lived in them. Things

staggered sideways a while. Suddenly

I'm stretched enough to call certain of my days

the old days, remembering how we burned

to hear of the destruction of the world,

how we hoped for it until many of us were dead,

the most were lost, and a couple lucky

enough to stand terrified outside the walls

of Jerusalem knowing things we never learned.

It's raining, and the streetlights on the wet

street are like regurgitated lights,

but the ambulance's ruby element

can move among our rooms without a care,

so that we who generally sleep

where it is black awaken in a red

light of other lives, saying I

can see every article,

I can see every article in its fame.

Saying How long do I stay here in the jail

of times like this, where the clear

water has the flavor of thirst

and the meat tastes like it is eating me

and the day's bread changes into a face?

Where sometimes you see the sorrow of a whole life

open away from you white as an invitation

on the blue of night, and the moon is a monster?

All the night long I can betray myself in the honky-tonk

of terror and delight, I can throw away my faith,

go loose in the spectacular fandango

of emergencies that strum the heart

with neon, but I can't

understand anything. It is coming:

the curtains of rain and light the arc lamps

let down on First Avenue will be parted,

and from behind them, the people we really are will step out

with abandon, as if asked to dance—

the myriad tickets will fall away from the face

and the visions of the heart be delivered up naked

and lucid as teeth, and each

of the things that catch up with this robber

will fall on God: now
You
must follow

the spoor of Your own blood among

edifices, among monuments, until the police

have You in their arms

and make You say Your name.

I want to be there when the little pool of light

falls on the identification,

I swear I will never tell the others if You whisper

to me what this moment is before the ambulances,

and what these moments are

when all that was impending

begins, when the whole

downtown, arrested like a lung

between intake and expulsion, erupts

into genuineness—as if many

bells have been struck and what

the world is, is that I can touch

their ringing. It is unbreakable.

It is the examiner before whom the emptiness

inside me perjures itself.

It is the examiner who is a fist.

At left, with a net, in a light

like whiskey, you skim flotsam

from the water.

I can't tell you how vivid

this undertaking is—

you are as unsettling

and as naked as that yellow

flower admiring you as it rests

along the surface of the pool.

I am just going to listen

to the sound of liquid,

the sound of oleanders.

If ever

I was about to speak I

forget. I can see

that the single flower goes

aloft on the water of

the pool because it is something

that everything has addressed

to my darling, while I stand

here like some ashes

that used to be a clown,

looking out quietly

from my face to watch the failure

of these words to be those things.

Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends
I did not know who she was
.